by Guy Haley
Perturabo growled with outrage. ‘That is my purpose! You said that I would be given the honour of breaking Dorn’s fortress. You do not listen to me, brother. You dismiss my ideas. You do not let me attack the sun of Sol itself to bring this to a speedy conclusion, or to break Terra into rubble. You wave away my plans of planetary Exterminatus. You keep me at arm’s length, and now this insult? Dorn’s humbling is mine to accomplish!’ His famed temper boiled quickly once provoked, and before he had finished he was shouting.
‘I did,’ said the Warmaster evenly. ‘I meant what I said. You will have your turn, Lord of Iron. The Mechanicum will prepare the ground for your Legion, so that your genius may be set to work with minimal distraction. Your task on the system fringe is done. Return now. Begin your plans for the contravallation of the Palace.’
Perturabo calmed, reassuming his dour manner like iron plunged into a quenching barrel.
‘I have my plans prepared already,’ said Perturabo pettishly. ‘Dorn cannot stand before me.’
‘When will the Legions land?’ said Angron.
‘My orders remain as they were. No Space Marine is to set foot on Terra yet,’ said Horus.
‘A legionary attack will draw out the defenders,’ wheedled Fulgrim. ‘Let my children out to play, most lordly brother. We can destroy at will, and weaken the Palace defences. I am bored!’
‘I have a role for you. One you will enjoy. Like all the greatest pleasures, it must be deferred a while. Until then, the bombardment continues,’ said Horus. ‘If we feed our legionaries into the fire piecemeal, we will all burn. The attacks on the walls must be complete, total and overwhelming.’
‘What of my Neverborn legions?’ said Angron. ‘What of this witch’s hex that keeps me from battle?’
Zardu Layak stepped forwards.
‘Not him! Hold your tongue, priest. Where is Lord Magnus?’ Angron bellowed.
‘Yes, Magnus. We would take his word on this subject, not that of this… groveller,’ said Perturabo dismissively.
‘Let Layak speak,’ Horus commanded.
The primarchs fell to grudging quiet.
‘The Emperor shields Terra,’ said Layak. ‘But He cannot do so forever. Blood flows in such torrents upon the Throneworld that it calls across the barrier between the warp and the material realm. Souls flee their bodies in crowds, every one wearing at the fabric of space and time.’ He rubbed his fingers together. ‘Each death sees the servants of the Pantheon push harder on the veil. When the weight of slaughter is great enough, then they will be called through in their multitudes. By my god-granted vision I see vast legions of the Neverborn ready to take to the field. The door is creaking. The latch rattles. We lack but a key.’
Perturabo was the first to grasp the strategy, and nodded in understanding. ‘If father’s dogs attack the siege camps, they will spill more blood, and aid the coming of your allies. If they do not, then the Mechanicum may raise engines by the dozen to break the walls. Dorn will see this, but he will have no choice.’ A rare smile broke across Perturabo’s features. ‘He will have to fight it either way, and give you victory whatever his choice is. A bridgehead of blood!’ To his brothers’ amazement, he began to laugh.
‘Then I shall land first!’ said Angron enthusiastically. ‘I shall come at them, and cleave their bodies!’
‘You will not,’ said another. A familiar voice, a quiet, rasping, sullen growl, but changed, thickened with phlegm. ‘I claimed the task. My Legion will be first to attack the walls, as I pledged to the Warmaster months ago.’
Mortarion, primarch of the Death Guard, entered through the grand doors of Lupercal’s court. This was not Mortarion as his brothers remembered him. He was changed, like Angron, Fulgrim and Magnus, lifted by the Pantheon and given new form. Always among the tallest of the primarchs, he had grown further, his famine-spare frame pushed to great height. Tattered moth’s wings furled on his back. The scythe Silence had grown with its master, become as long as a vox-transmission pole. Mortarion appeared sickly, his face scarred by disease and his eyes milky with cataracts. Fluid wept from craters in his dirty armour, while all around him swirled a dense, stinking fog.
Where he passed the door guard, Abaddon’s Justaerin fell heavily. Black fluid leaked from perished seals and bloody phlegm coughed from their breathing grilles. The sounds of armour closing itself against the environment filled the room, but it did no good. The Terminators suffered in the grip of sickness. Mortarion continued forwards, felling Horus’ elite by his very presence.
‘Back away from him!’ Abaddon commanded. ‘Seal the room!’
Atmospheric cyclers ceased turning. Machines bleeped out tones of compliance. Still the Lord of Death marched forwards. Kibre began to cough behind his mask. Aximand took several steps back, his face greening as he fumbled on his helm. Layak dropped to his knees, singing praise in the ear-burning tongue of his worship, but he too struggled to breathe Mortarion’s miasma. Of them all, only Horus, Tormageddon and Abaddon were left unaffected. A stench wreathed the Lord of Death that defied any kind of description. Human senses lacked the capacity to experience it in fullness. So foul, so pungent with rot and sickly life was it, that it triggered Abaddon’s omophagea, and he tasted a bouquet of miseries sublime in their variety. It shocked him to his soul that he could breathe. He looked to the others choking on Mortarion’s foetor, and yet when the primarch approached Abaddon, he inhaled easily, though the stench appalled him.
Mortarion stopped a few feet from his brother’s throne. Pearlescent eyes stared down into brown, both afire with inner power that was not of the material realm. His breathing was laboured, rattling in his lungs so that each exhalation sounded like his last. Puffs of reeking corpse-gas jetted from Mortarion’s mask.
Aximand and Kibre dragged themselves back, behind the throne, crawling as far as they could from the corrupted primarch. Retching grated from Kibre’s voxmitter as he vomited into his helmet. Aximand pulled himself into a corner, managed to roll onto his back, and lay there stupefied.
The Lord of Death slammed the ferrule of Silence upon the floor hard.
‘My Warmaster, I heed your call.’
With those words he knelt. The height his transformation had bestowed meant that he was as tall as the seated Warmaster even when he bowed.
Abaddon suppressed a sneer. Such weakness. The Lord of Death had traded his position as a lord of men to become a slave of the gods.
Angron paced in and out of the field of view of his holo-emitter. Fulgrim giggled. Perturabo glared.
‘My brother, we welcome you,’ said Horus. ‘Rise.’
Bones popped as the Lord of Death stood again. ‘I come to fulfil my promise and lead the assault upon the Palace.’ His voice, once a pure bass, was a hoarse whisper.
‘You are greatly gifted by our patrons,’ Horus said, taking in his brother’s transformation. ‘You will not be able to set foot upon Terra.’
‘I have patience. My sons will go before me to prepare the way. They are ready,’ said Mortarion. ‘We bring new weapons for an old war. My warriors have transcended the limitations of mortality. Nothing can harm them, while I have seven plagues for you to unleash upon Terra. Let the unseen soldiers of bacillus and virus reap the foe, and add their deaths to the total, and when the tally pleases Father Nurgle, then I shall descend to the Palace, and take my vengeance upon the False Emperor.’
‘Do you see?’ said Horus. ‘You all must wait, but not for long.’ He raised his voice to address them all, but stared Angron in the eye. ‘The second phase of the invasion begins tonight. Once the Mechanicum begin the construction of their siege engines, then Mortarion’s Legion shall be given the honour of being first upon Terra.’
‘No!’ shouted Angron. ‘No! It should be me!’
‘It is my will,’ said Horus, ‘that the Death Guard attack first.’
A new pattern
The bombardment continues
Sea of mud
Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 1st-13th of Tertius
A new pattern was set. For two weeks after the first landing, the enemy attacks followed the same routine. Swarms of enemy bombers and fighters descended from orbit while the fleet pounded the void shield periphery. Somehow, the exact mechanism was beyond Katsuhiro, the enemy got through, and while the ships in orbit hurled their fury at the ground, the attack craft bombed and strafed everything they could. Every attack saw the aegis lose efficacy, so that each successful raid inflicted more damage. The shields over the Palace proper were inviolable; not so those around the edges. The trench lines took a pounding. Kilometres of works were obliterated, along with the men and women guarding them. The nature of the landscape before the Daylight Wall was transformed. The perfect flatness of planed away mountains was upheaved, and new peaks and declivities carved by orbital attack. Quakes shook the ground as the planetary crust was disturbed.
All the while, the enemy landed more of his troops. They came down as regular as the tides, rising up across the twisted landscape to break against the fortifications in spumes of blood. Though it was cold at such an altitude, the stink of spoiling flesh infiltrated everything.
The sun was gone, hidden by clouds of ash black as the sackcloth of myth. Winds laden with corpse dust blew from far-off cities. When the visibility was good enough, they saw the funeral pyres of distant hives.
Spring approached. The energy poured upon Terra caused a rapid warming, and snow turned to rain, even at the top of the world. Freezing mud clogged everything. Watered now by blood, the ground reeked horribly. The recruits fought in the clothes they had been drafted in. Nobody had anything to change into, nor was there water to wash. They became a dirty tribe, skulking behind their broken ramparts in the shadows of the Imperium’s greatest fortress. Whatever their original skin colour they were remade in a single shade, caked in grey dust, red raw eyes startling in their filthy faces. Dust coated the whole world. Their clothes took on the hue of the ground, the fortifications, the downed ships. Everything was the same colour, everything smelled the same, living and dead.
A lucky few were given coats to stave off the cold. Katsuhiro was not among them. To begin with he cut a hole in the middle of his blanket and wore it over his head as a poncho. He was never warm, even when the dead provided him with a padded jacket and trousers more suited to the climate. All were bloodied, and covered in excrement and rotting flesh. He had ceased to care. The cold was a worse killer than the guns. Battle was an infrequent peril. The cold was persistent.
Sometimes, it rained a toxic slime of pollutants from the burning cities. When it stopped, it left behind a metallic stink. Those who dared to drink the rain perished. Some tried for lack of water – thirst and hunger tormented them all – but after a time, some drank the water purposefully in order to escape. The rain brought other dangers. When tech-adepts and their robotic guardians paced the outworks on their inscrutable tasks, rad clickers rattled loud as hysterical ravens.
‘We’re all dead,’ Katsuhiro said, to no one in particular, one night when they tried to snatch some rest. His teeth wobbled in his gums. His hair was falling out. ‘The question is when.’
‘That’s the question asked the moment you were born, boy,’ said Runnecan. He was one of the few Katsuhiro knew. He never learned many of the others’ names. The conscripts hadn’t made much of an effort to get to know one another. Death took most before familiarity could set in.
Sleep was only ever taken in snatches. Watches were four hours long. The enemy could come at any time, and did. Katsuhiro’s time was filled with terrifying battles repulsing hordes of raving traitors, sheltering from the bombs, or engaged in backbreaking manual labour repairing the fortifications. Their efforts were overseen by tech magi, not the VII Legion as the conscripts hoped. At least sometimes the Martians lent their servitors or constructs to the task, though machines and cyborgs were just as likely to stand aloof while sentient men worked themselves to death.
Daily, trench networks spidered out from nexuses like Bastion 16, bridging shattered sections of the original rampart system, or breaking up the kill-zone between the lines into defensible boxes. Sometimes they looped out into the plains to create deeper zones of defence for the bastions, or incorporate lumps of wreckage into the plan. Remarkably quickly, Lord Dorn’s original circles of defence were remade, but as soon as they were done, the enemy did his work again. Trench lines were smoothed away, along with the lives of those within, and the digging started anew. Constant attacks broke up the stone of the geoformed plain, but although this eased the cutting of trenches, it churned flesh into the mix, making the work abominable. The walls of the networks were mortared by the remains of the dead.
Such things Katsuhiro saw in those two weeks. A lifetime’s supply of fear and awe packed into a terrible winter. There were rains of debris that created an optimist’s wealth of shooting stars; each wish Katsuhiro made was not to die. Sometimes, huge elements of sundered craft made it down from the heavens, or entire vessels cut burning wakes overhead. Once, a capital ship, its back broken, fell on the Palace. It appeared suddenly through the ash cloud, its burning lighting up the land. It plummeted towards the Palace centre, disappearing from view behind the monumental walls moments before impact. They expected the worst. Men stood from their defences pointing. A voice called.
‘The Emperor has fallen!’
The detonation that followed could only confirm their fears. A brief sun rose in the west over the Palace, vaporising the Warmaster’s falling ordnance and half blinding the conscripts with its brilliance. For a second a searing false day bled all colour away, then winked out, leaving after-images in the eyes of its witnesses, and the rumble of thermic shock rolling over Himalazia’s distant peaks.
‘The Emperor!’ someone whispered.
Further down the line people were weeping.
Yet the Palace guns fired on, punching glowing holes through the pall of ash smothering the sky, and the Warmaster’s fleet returned the same, while the aegis danced with purple, pink and blue arcs of discharge as it had for days and days.
‘The Emperor lives, so do you. The shields took it!’ shouted one of Jainan’s veteran bullies. He moved down the line, shoving people back to the wall. ‘No danger! All mass and energy gone into the warp. That’s the aegis’ job or we’d all be dead a thousand times already. Back to your stations. The war’s not over yet.’
Indeed it was not.
Sometimes, hours passed with no attempt made on sector 16. Its bastion heart fired ceaselessly, one small part of the Palace’s endless array of weaponry. Three macro cannons with limited traversal studded its outwards-facing walls. The rearmost portion was free of guns, to prevent their use against the fortifications should it fall to the enemy. Between these iron-collared behemoths, the slimmer barrels of lascannons protruded, and neat stacks of heavy bolters in vertical series. The top was crowned with anti-aircraft weaponry, whose quad cannons, each as big as super-heavy tank barrels, banged endlessly away. Their distinctive chattering became the background to Katsuhiro’s life, so constant and unvarying that he only really became aware of them when they stopped firing briefly to cool.
Behind Bastion 16 were Bastions 15 and 14, offset from the outermost tower to provide the greatest amount of cover. Bastion 14 made the transition from active defence to blackened stump sometime around the end of Secundus, taking a direct hit from orbit that sent its magazines up in a pyrotechnic display. Bastion 15 went soon after.
Katsuhiro lost track of the date. It seemed to him that time flowed differently on the line. Life became a series of horrifying incidents interspersed by periods of exhausted terror. If he had been familiar with the old Catheric myths, Katsuhiro would have thought himself in hell.
Despite all the privations and loss of liberty the rebellion had incurred on Terra, and
the sorrow and the death of hope for man’s future, the war had been far away. Now he was living it.
Thus was the pattern of the siege set, until, inevitably, it changed.
Blood and skulls
Father’s wrath
Five of Eight
The Conqueror, Terran near orbit, 14th of Tertius
The Conqueror shook to the steady beat of its guns. Since arrival in orbit over the Throneworld, they had not ceased. Overseers worked their gunnery crews to death. Weapons fired to the point of failure. Reports that the magazines were running empty went unheeded.
The Legion did not care. The World Eaters could not hear the booming of cannons. They did not feel the decks vibrate. Their skulls sang with the sawing song of the Butcher’s Nails, and that obliterated all other sensation.
At being denied the spear point, Angron had lost all vestiges of restraint. The Legion agreed with him.
Violence had been endemic on the Conqueror for years now. The thralls knew to keep themselves apart and seal themselves away where they could, lessening the effects of the great massacres that had come after the Thramas Crusade. With little to spend their rage on, fights broke out between rival squads of legionaries, staining decks that were already black with mortal vitae with transhuman blood. Those particularly afflicted were brought under control only with much bloodshed, which provoked more. Others made for the embarkation decks and the lesser hangars, eager to be off the ship in defiance of their orders to remain aboard.
Angron could not be restrained again as he had been before Ullanor. He strode his vessel as a pillar of living rage. The deck plates shook to his tread. The air trembled to his words. Where he went, lives ended, but when he learned his sons attempted to depart the Conqueror, his rage could finally no longer be contained, and his rampage cut a bloody swathe through his Legion.
